PART IV

 

XII

 

Despite the season the seafront of the city was gay with light - the long sloping lines of the Grande Corniche curving away to a low horizon; a thousand lighted panels of glass in which, like glorious tropical fish, the inhabitants of the European city sat at glittering tables stocked with glasses of mastic, aniseed or brandy.  Watching them (I had eaten little lunch) my hunger overcame me and, as there was some time in hand before my meeting with Justine, I turned into the glittering doors of the Diamond Sutra and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of whisky.  Once again, as always when the drama of external events altered the emotional pattern of things, I began to see the city through new eyes - to examine the shapes and contours made by human beings with the detachment of an entomologist studying a hitherto unknown species of insect.  Here it was, the race, each member of it absorbed in the solution of individual preoccupations, loves, hates and fears.  A woman counting money on to a glass table, an old man feeding a dog, an Arab in a red flowerpot drawing a curtain.

      Aromatic smoke poured from the small sailor taverns along the seafront where the iron spits loaded with a freight of entrails and spices turned monotonously back and forth, or bellied from under the lids of shining copper cauldrons, giving off hot gusts of squid, cuttlefish and pigeon.  Here one drank from the blue cans and ate with one's fingers as they do in the Cyclades even today.

      I picked up a decrepit horse-cab and jogged along by the sighing sea towards the Aurore, drinking in the lighted darkness with regrets and fears so fugitive as to be beyond analysis; but underneath (like a toad under a cool stone, the surface airs of night) I still felt the stirrings of horror at the thought that Justine herself might be endangered by the lover which 'we bore one another'.  I turned the thought this way and that in my mind, like a prisoner pressing with all his weight upon doors which denied him an exist from an intolerable bondage, trying to devise an issue from a situation which, it seemed, might as well end in her death as in mine.

      The great car was waiting, drawn up off the road in the darkness under the pepper-trees.  She opened the door for me silently and I got in, spellbound by my fears.

      'Well,' she said at last and, giving a little groan which expressed everything, sank into my arms and pressed her warm mouth on mine.  'Did you go?  Is it over?'

      'Yes.'

      She let in the clutch and the driving wheels spurned the gravel as the car moved out into the pearly nightfall and began to follow the coast road to the outer desert.  I studied her harsh Semitic profile in the furry light flung back by the headlights from the common objects of the roadside.  It belonged so much to the city which I now saw as a series of symbols stretching away from us on either side - minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms; it lived in a heraldic relation to the exhausted landscapes which enclosed it - the loops of the great lake: as proper to the scene as the Sphinx was to the desert.

      'My ring,' she said.  'You brought it?'       

      'Yes.'  I polished it once more on my tie and slipped it back once more on to its appropriate finger.  Involuntarily I said now: 'Justine, what is to become of us?'

      She gave me a wild frowning look like a Bedouin woman, and then she smiled the warm smile.  'Why?'

      'Surely you see?  We shall have to stop this altogether.  I can't bear to think you might be in danger.... Or else I should go straight to Nessim and confront him with....' With what?  I did not know.

      'No,' she said softly, 'no.  You could no do it.  You are an Anglo-Saxon ... you couldn't step outside the law like that, could you?  You are not one of us.  Besides, you could tell Nessim nothing he does not guess if not actually know.... Darling,' she laid her warm hand upon mine, 'simply wait ... simply love, above all ... and we shall see.'

      It is astonishing now for me to realize, as I record this scene, that she was carrying within her (invisible as the already conceived foetus of a child) Pursewarden's death: that her kisses were, for all I know, falling upon the graven image of my friend - the deathmask of the writer who himself did not love her, indeed regarded her with derision.  But such a demon is love that I would not be surprised if in a queer sort of way his death actually enriched our own love-making, filling it with the deceits on which the minds of women feed - the compost of secret pleasures and treacheries which are an inseparable part of every human relation.

      Yet what have I to complain of?  Even this half-love filled my heart to overflowing.  It is she, if anyone, who had cause for complaint.  It is very hard to understand these things.  Was she already planning her flight from Alexandria then?  'The power of woman is such,' writes Pursewarden, 'that a single kiss can paraphrase the reality of man's life and turn it ...' but why go on?  I was happy sitting beside her, felling the warmth of her hand as it lay in mine.

      The blue night was hoary with stars and the attentive desert stretched away on either side with its grotesque amphitheatres - like the empty rooms in some great cloud-mansion.  The moon was late and wan tonight, the air still, the dunes wind-carved.  'What are you thinking?' said my lover.

      What was I thinking?  Of a passage in Proclus which says that Orpheus ruled over the silver race, meaning those who led a 'silver' life; on Balthazar's mantelpiece presumably among the pipe-cleaners and the Indian wood-carving of monkeys which neither saw, spoke nor heard evil, under a magic pentacle from Pythagoras.  What was I thinking?  The foetus in its waxen wallet, the locust squatting in the horn of the wheat, an Arab quoting a proverb which reverberated in the mind.  'The memory of man is as old as misfortune.'  The quails from the burst cage spread upon the ground softly like honey, having no idea of escape.  In the Scent Bazaar the flavour of Persian lilac.

      'Fourteen thousand years ago,' I said aloud, 'Vega in Lyra was the Pole Star.  Look at her where she burns.'

      The beloved head turned with its frowning deep-set eyes and once more I see the long boats drawing in to the Pharos, the tides running, the minarets a-glitter with dew; noise of the blind Hodja crying in the voice of a mole assaulted by sunlight; a shuffle-pad of a camel-train clumping to a festival carrying dark lanterns.  An Arab woman makes my bed, beating the pillows till they fluff out like white egg under a whisk; a passage in Pursewarden's book which reads: 'They looked at each other, aware that there was neither youth nor strength enough between them to prevent their separation.'  When Melissa was pregnant by Nessim, Amaril could not perform the abortion Nessim so much desired because of her illness and her weak heart.  'She may die anyway,' he said, and Nessim nodded curtly and took up his overcoat.  But she did not die then, she bore the child....

      Justine is quoting something in Greek which I do not recognize:

 

                                                     Sand, dog-roses and white rocks

                                                     Of Alexandria, the mariner's sea-marks,

                                                     Some sprawling dunes falling and pouring

                                                     Sand into water, water into sand,

                                                     Never into the wine of exile

                                                     Which stains the air it is poured through;

                                                     Or a voice which stains the mind,

                                                     Singing in Arabic: 'A ship without a sail

                                                     Is a woman without breasts.'  Only that.  Only that.

 

      We walked hand in hand across the soft sand-dunes, laboriously as insects, until we reached Taposiris with its rumble of shattered columns and capitals among the ancient weather-eroded sea-marks.  ('Reliques of sensation,' says Coleridge, 'may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state in the very same order in which they were impressed.')  Yes, but the order of the imagination is not that of memory.  A faint wind blew off the sea from the Grecian archipelago.  The sea was smooth as a human cheek.  Only at the edges it stirred and sighed.  Those warm kisses remain there, amputated from before and after, existing in their own right like the frail transparencies of ferns or roses pressed between the covers of old books - unique and unfading as the memories of the city they exemplified and evoked: a plume of music from a forgotten carnival-guitar echoing on the dark streets of Alexandria for as long as silence lasts....

      I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits - but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city, steeped in its values; like those creatures of whom Empedocles wrote: 'Solitary limbs wandered, seeking for union with one another,' or in another place, 'So it is that sweet lays hold of sweet, bitter rushes to bitter, acid comes to acid, warm couples with warm.'  All members of a city whose actions lay just outside the scope of the plotting or conniving spirit: Alexandrians.

      Justine, lying back against a fallen column at Taposiris, dark head upon the darkness of the sighing water, one curl lifted by the sea-winds, saying: 'In the whole of English only one phrase means something to me, the words "Time Immemorial".'

      Seen across the transforming screens of memory, how remote that forgotten evening seems.  There was so much as yet left for us all to live through until we reached the occasion of the great duckshoot which so abruptly, concisely, precipitated the final change - and the disappearance of Justine herself.  But all this belongs to another Alexandria - one which I created in my mind and which the great Interlinear of Balthazar has, if not destroyed, changed out of all recognition.

      'To intercalate realities,' writes Balthazar, 'is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity.  Life consists in the act of choice.  The perpetual reservations of judgement and the perpetual choosing.'

      From the vantage-point of this island I can see it all in its doubleness, in the intercalation of fact and fancy, with new eyes; and re-reading, re-working reality in the light of all I now know, I am surprised to find that my feelings themselves have changed, have grown, have deepened even.  Perhaps then the destruction of my private Alexandria was necessary ('the artefact of a true work of art never shows a plane surface'); perhaps buried in all this there lies the germ and substance of a truth - time's usufruct - which, if I can accommodate it, will carry me a little further in what is really a search for my proper self.  We shall see.

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

XIII

 

'Clea and her old father, whom she worships.  White-haired, erect, with a sort of haunted pity in his eyes for the young unmarried goddess he has fathered.  Once a year, however, on New Year's eve, they dance at the Cecil, stately, urbanely.  He waltzes like a clockwork man.'  Somewhere I once wrote down these words.  They bring to mind another scene, another sequence of events.

      The old scholar comes to sit at my table.  He has a particular weakness for me, I do not know why, but he always talks to me with humorous modesty as we sit and watch his beautiful daughter move around the room in the arms of an admirer, so graceful and so composed.  'There is so much of the schoolgirl still about her - or the artist.  Tonight her cape had some wine on it so she put a mackintosh over her ball gown and ate the toffees which she found in the pockets.  I don't know what her mother would say if she were alive.'  We drank quietly and watched the coloured lights flickering among the dancers.  He said 'I feel like an old procurer.  Always looking out for someone to marry her.... Her happiness seems so important, somehow ... I am going the right way about to spoil it I know, by meddling ... yet I can't leave it alone ... I've scraped a dowry together over the years.... The money burns my pocket.... When I see a nice Englishman like you, my instinct is to say: "For God's sake take her and look after her."... It has been a bitter pleasure bringing her up without a mother.  Eh?  No fool like an old fool.'  And he walks stiffly away to the bar, smiling.

      Presently that evening Clea herself came and sat beside me in the alcove, fanning herself and smiling.  'Quarter of an hour to midnight.  Poor Cinderella.  I must get my father home before the clock strikes or he'll lose his beauty-sleep!'

      We spoke then of Amar whose trial for the murder of de Brunel had ended that afternoon with his acquittal due to lack of direct evidence.

      'I know,' said Clea softly.  'And I'm glad.  It has saved me from a crise de conscience.  I would not have known what to do if he had been convicted.  You see, I know he didn't do it.  Why?  Because, my dear, I know who did and why....'  She narrowed those splendid eyes and went on: 'A story of Alexandria - shall I tell you?  But only if you keep it a secret.  Would you promise me?  Bury it with the old year - all our misfortunes and follies.  You must have had a surfeit of them by now, must you not?  All right.  Listen.  On the night of the carnival I lay in bed thinking about a picture - the big one of Justine.  It was all wrong and I didn't know where.  But I suspected the hands - those dark and shapely hands.  I had got their position quite faithfully, but, well, something in the composition didn't go; it had started to trouble me at this time - months after the thing was finished.  I can't think why.  Suddenly I said to myself "Those hands want thinking about," and I had the thing lugged back to my room from the studio where I stood it against a wall.  Well, to no effect, really; I'd spent the whole evening smoking over it, and sketching the hands in different positions from memory.  Somehow I thought it might be that beastly Byzantine ring which she wears.  Anyway, all my thinking was of no avail, so about midnight I turned in and lay smoking in bed with my cat asleep on my feet.

      'From time to time a small group of people passed outside in the street, singing or laughing, but gradually the town was draining itself of life, for it was getting late.

      'Suddenly in the middle of the silence I heard feet running at full speed.  I have never heard anyone run so fast, so lightly.  Only danger or terror or distress could make someone put on such a mad burst of speed, I thought, as I listened.  Down Rue Fuad came the footsteps at the same breakneck pace and turned the corner into St Saba, getting louder all the time.  They crossed over, paused, and then crossed back to my side of the street.  Then came a wild peeling at my bell.

      'I sat up in some surprise and switched on the light to look at the clock.  Who could it be at such a time?  While I was still sitting there irresolutely, it came again: a long double peel.  Well!  The electric switch on the front door is shut off at midnight, so there was no help for it but to go down and see who it was.  I put on a dressing-gown and slipping my little pistol into the pocket I went down to see.  There was a shadow on the glass of the front door which was too thick to challenge anyone through, so I had to open it.  I stood back a bit.  "Who's there?"

      'There was a man standing there, hanging in the corner of the door like a bat.  He was breathing heavily, for I saw his breast rising and falling, but he made no sound.  He wore a domino, but the headpiece was turned back so that I could see his face in the light of the street-lamp.  I was of course rather frightened for a moment.  He looked as if he were about to faint.  It took me about ten seconds before I could put a name to the ugly face which its cruel great harelip.  Then relief flooded me and my feet got pins and needles.  Do you know who it was?  His hair was matted with sweat and in that queer light his eyes looked enormous - blue and childish.  I realized that it was that strange brother of Nessim's - the one nobody ever sees.  Narouz Hosnani.  Even this was rather a feat of memory: I only remembered him vaguely from time to time when Nessim took me riding on the Hosnani lands.  You can imagine my concern to see him like this, unexpectedly, in the middle of the night.

      'I did not know what to say, and he for his part was trying to articulate something, but the words would not come.  It seemed he had two sentences jammed together in the front of his mind, like cartridges in the muzzle of a gun, and neither would give place to the other.  His leaned inwards upon me with a ghastly incoherence, his hands hanging down almost below his knees which gave him an ape-like silhouette, and croaked something at me.  You mustn't laugh.  It was horrifying.  Then he drew a great breath and forced his muscles to obey him and said in a small marionette's voice: "I have come to tell you that I love you because I have killed Justine."  For a moment I almost suspected a joke.  "What?" I stammered.  He repeated in an even smaller voice, a whisper, but mechanically as a child repeating a lesson: "I have come to tell you that I love you because I have killed Justine."  Then in a deep voice he added: "Oh, Clea, if you but knew the agony of it."  And he gave a sob and fell on his knees in the hall, holding the edge of my dressing-gown, his head bowed while the tears trickled down his nose.

      'I didn't know what to do.  I was at once horrified and disgusted, and yet I couldn't help feeling sorry.  From time to time he gave a small harsh cry - the noise of a she-camel crying, or of some dreadful mechanical toy, perhaps.  It was unlike anything I have seen or heard before or since.  His trembling was communicated to me through the fringe of my gown which he held in two fingers.

      '"Get up," I said at last, and raising his head he croaked: "I swear I did not mean to do it.  It happened before I could think.  She put her hand upon me, Clea, she made advances to me.  Horrible.  Nessim's own wife."

      'I did not know what to make of all this.  Had he really harmed Justine?  "You just come upstairs," I said, keeping tight hold of my little pistol, for his expression was pretty frightening.  "Get up now."  He got up at once, quite obediently, and followed me back up the stairs, but leaning heavily against the wall and whispering something incoherently to himself, Justine's name, I think, though it sounded more like "Justice".

      '"Come in while I telephone," I said, and he followed me slowly, half-blinded by the light.  He stood by the door for a moment, accustoming himself to it, and then he saw the portrait.  He exclaimed with great force: "This Jewish fox has eaten my life," and struck his fists against his thighs several times.  Then he put his hands over his face and breathed deeply.  We waited like this, facing one another, while I thought what there was to be done.  They had all gone to the Cervoni ball, I knew.  I would telephone them to find out if there was any truth in this story.

      'Meanwhile Narouz opened his fingers and peeped at me.  He said: "I only came to tell you I loved you before giving myself up to my brother."  Then he spread his hands in a hopeless gesture.  "That is all."

      'How disgusting, how unfair love is!  Here I had been loved for goodness knows how long by a creature - I cannot say a fellow-creature - of whose very existence I had been unaware.  Every breath I drew was unconsciously a form of his suffering, without my ever having been aware of it.  How had this disaster come about?  You will have to make room in your thoughts for this variety of the animal.  I was furious, disgusted and wounded in one and the same moment.  I felt almost as if I owed him an apology; and yet I also felt insulted by the intrusiveness of a love which I had never asked him to owe me.

      'Narouz looked now as if he were in a high fever.  His teeth chattered in his head and he was shaken by spasms of violent shivering.  I gave him a glass of cognac which he drained at one gulp, and then another even larger one.  Drinking it he sank slowly down to the carpet and doubled his legs under him like an Arab.  "It is better at last," he whispered, and looking sadly around him added: "So this is where you live.  I have wanted to see it for years.  I have been imagining it all."  Then he frowned and coughed and combed his hair back with his fingers.

      'I rang the Cervoni house and almost at once got hold of Nessim.  I questioned him tactfully, without giving anything away.  But there seemed nothing wrong, as far as could be judged, though he could not at that moment locate Justine.  She was somewhere on the dance-floor.  Narouz listened to all this with staring surprised eyes, incredulous.  "She is due to meet them in the hall in ten minutes' time.  Finish your drink and wait until she rings up.  Then you will know that there has been some mistake."  He closed his eyes and seemed to pray.

      'I sat down opposite him on the sofa, not knowing quite what to say.  "What exactly happened?" I asked him.  All of a sudden his eyes narrowed and grew small, suspicious-looking.  Then he sighed and hung his head, tracing the design of the carpet with his finger.  "It is not for you to hear," he whispered, his lips trembling.

      'We waited like this, and all of a sudden, to my intense embarrassment and disgust, he began to talk of his love for me, but in the tone of a man talking to himself.  He seemed almost oblivious of me, never once looking up into my face.  And I felt all the apologetic horror that comes over me when I am admired or desired and cannot reciprocate the feeling.  I was somehow ashamed too, looking at that brutal tear-stained face, simply because I could not feel the slightest stirring of sympathy within my heart.  He sat there on the carpet like some great brown toad, talking; like some story-book troglodyte.  What the devil was I to do?  "When have you seen me?" I asked him.  He had only seen me three times in his life, though frequently at night he passed through the street to see if my light was on.  I swore under my breath.  It was so unfair.  I had done nothing to merit this grotesque passion.

      'Then at last came a reprieve.  The telephone rang, and he trembled all over like a hound as he heard the unmistakable hoarse tones of the woman he thought he had killed.  There was nothing wrong that she knew of, and she was on he way home with Nessim.  Everything was as it should be at the Cervoni house and the ball was still going on at full blast.  As I said goodnight I felt Narouz clasp my slippers and begin kissing them with gratitude.  "Thank you, thank you," he repeated over and over again.

      '"Come on.  Get up.  It's time to go home."  I was deathly tired by now.  I advised him to go straight back home and to confide his story to nobody.  "Perhaps you have imagined the whole thing," I said, and he gave me a tired but brilliant smile.

      'He walked slowly and heavily downstairs before me, still shaken by his experience, it was clear, but the hysteria had left him.  I opened the front door, and he tried once more to express his incoherent gratitude and affection.  He seized my hands and kissed them repeatedly with great wet hairy kisses.  Ugh!  I can feel them now.  And then, before turning into the night, he said in a low voice, smiling: "Clea, this is the happiest day of my life, to have seen and touched you and to have seen your little room."'

      Clea sipped her drink, nodding into the middle distance for a moment with a sad smile on her face.  Then she looked at her own brown hands and gave a little shudder.  'Ugh!  The kisses,' she said under her breath and with an involuntary movement began to rub her hands, palms upward, upon the red plush arm of the chair, as if to obliterate the kisses once and for all, to expunge the memory of them.

      But now the band had begun to play a Paul Jones (perhaps the very dance in which Arnauti first met Justine?) and the warm lighted gallery of faces began to fan out once more from the centre of the darkness, the brilliance of flesh and cloth and jewels in the huge gaunt ballroom where the palms splintered themselves in the shivering mirrors: leaking through the windows to where the moonlight waited patiently among the deserted public gardens and highways, troubling the uneasy water of the outer harbour with its glittering heartless gestures.  'Come,' said Clea, 'why do you never play a part in these things?  Why do you prefer to sit apart and study us all?'

      But I was thinking as I watched the circle of lovely faces move forward and reverse among the glitter of jewellery and the rustle of silks, of the Alexandrians to whom these great varieties of experience meant only one more addition to the sum of an infinite knowledge husbanded by their world-weariness.  Round and round the floor we went, the women unconsciously following the motion of the stars, of the earth as it curved into space; and then suddenly, like a declaration of war, like an expulsion from the womb, silence came, and a voice crying: 'Take your partners please.'  And the lights throbbed down the spectrum of purple and a waltz began.  For a brief moment at the far end of the darkness I caught a glimpse of Nessim and Justine dancing together, smiling into each other's eyes.  The shapely hand on his shoulder still wore the great ring taken from the tomb of a Byzantine youth.  Life is short, art long.

      Clea's father was dancing with her, stiffly, happily, like a clockwork mouse; and he was kissing the gifted hand upon which the unwanted kisses of Narouz had fallen on that forgotten evening.  A daughter is closer than a wife.

      'At first,' writes Pursewarden, 'we seek to supplement the emptiness of our individuality through love, and for a brief moment enjoy the illusion of completeness.  But it is only an illusion.  For this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it.  Love joins and then divides.  How else would we be growing?'

      How else indeed?  But relieved to find myself once more partnerless I have already groped my way back to my dark corner where the empty chairs of the revellers stand like barren ears of corn.

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

XIV

 

In the early summer I received a letter from Clea with which this brief memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close.  It was unexpected.

 

      'Tashkent, Syria

      'Your letter, so unexpected after a silence which I feared might endure all through life, followed me out of Persia to this small house perched high on a hillside among the cedars and pines.  I have taken it for a few months in order to try my hand and brush on these odd mountains - rocks bursting with fresh water and Mediterranean flowers.  Turtle doves by day and nightingales by night.  What a relief after the dust.  How long is it?  Ah, my dear friend, I trembled a little as I slit open the envelope.  Why?  I was afraid that what you might have to say would drag me back by the hair to odd places and scenes long since abandoned; the old stations and sites of the personality which belonged to the Alexandrian Clea you knew - not to me any longer, or at any rate, not wholly.  I've changed.  A new woman, certainly a new painter is emerging, still a bit tender and shy like the horns of a snail - but new.  A whole new world of experience stands between us.... How could you know all this?  You would perhaps be writing to Clea, the old Clea; what would I find to say to you in reply?  I put off reading your letter until tonight.  It touched me and reply I must: so here it is - my own letter written at odd times, between painting sessions, or at night when I light the stove and make my dinner.  Today is a good day to begin it for it is raining - and the whole mountainside is under the hush of the rain and the noise of swollen springs.  The trees are alive with giant snails.

      'So Balthazar has been disturbing you with his troublesome new information?  I am not sure that I approve.  It may be good for you, but surely not for your book or books which must, I suppose, put us all in a very special position regarding reality.  I mean as "characters" rather than human beings.  No?  And why, you ask me, did I never tell you a tithe of the things you know now?  One never does, you know, one never does.  As a spectator standing equidistant between two friends or lovers one is always torn by friendship to intervene, to interfere - but one never does.  Rightly.  How could I tell you what I knew of Justine - or for that matter what I felt about your neglect of Melissa?  The very range of my sympathies for the three of your precluded it.  As for love, it is so paradoxical a creature and so satisfying in itself that it would not have been much altered by the intervention of truths from outside.  I am sure now, if you analyse your feelings, you will find you love Justine better because she betrayed you!  The whore is man's true darling, as I once told you, and we are born to love those who must wound us.  Am I wrong?  Besides, my own affection for you lay in another quarter.  I was jealous of you as a writer - and as a writer I wanted you to myself and did so keep you.  Do you see?

      'There is nothing I can do to help you now - I mean help your book.  You will either have to ignore the data which Balthazar has so wickedly supplied, or to "rework reality", as you put it.

      'And you say you were unjust to Pursewarden; yes, but it is not important.  He was equally unjust to you.  Unknown to either of you, you joined hands in me!  As writers.  My own regret is that he did not manage to finish the last volume of God is a Humorist according to plan.  It is a loss - though it cannot detract from his achievement.  You, I surmise, will soon be coming into the same degree of self-possession - perhaps through this cursed city of ours, Alexandria, to which we most belong when we most hate it.  By the way, I have a letter from Pursewarden about the missing volume which I have carried around with me among my papers for ages, like a talisman.  It helps not only to revive the man himself a bit, but to revive me also when I fall into a depression about my work.  (I must go to the village to buy eggs.  I shall copy it out tonight for you.)

      'Later.  Here is the letter I spoke about, harsh and crabbed if you like, but none the less typical of our friend.  Don't take his remarks about you too seriously.  He admired you and believed in you - so he once told me.  Perhaps he was lying.  Anyway.

 

 

            'Mount Vulture Hotel

            'Alexandria

'My dear Clea:

      'A surprise and delight to find your letter waiting for me.  Clement reader thank you - not for the blame or praise (one shrinks from both equally) but for being there, devoted and watchful, a true reader between the lines - where all real writing is done!  I have just come hotfoot from the Café Al Aktar after listening to a long discursion on "the novel" by old Lineaments and Keats and Pombal.  They talk as if every novel wasn't sui generis - it is as meaningless to me as Pombal generalizing about "les femmes" as a race; for after all it isn't the family relationship which really matters.  Well, Lineaments was saying that Redemption and Original Sin were the new topics and that the writer of today.... Ouf!  I fled, feeling like the writer of the day before yesterday, and unwilling to help them build this sort of mud-pie.

      'I'm sure old Lineaments will do a lovely novel about Original Sin and score what I always privately call a suck-eggs d'estime (it means not covering one's advance).  In fact, I was in such despair at the thought of his coming fame that I thought I would go straight off to a brothel and expiate my unoriginal sense of sin right away.  But the hour was early, and besides, I felt that I smelt of sweat, for it had been a hot day.  I therefore returned to the hotel for a shower and a change of shirt and so found your letter.  There is a little gin in the bottle and as I don't know where I shall be later on, I think I'll just sit down and answer you now as best I can until six when the brothels start to open.

      'The questions you ask me, my dear Clea, are the very questions I am putting myself.  I must get them a little clearer before I tidy up the last volume in which I want above all the combine, resolve and harmonize the tensions so far created.  I feel I want to sound a note of ... affirmation - though not in the specific terms of a philosophy of religion.  It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover's code.  It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law - but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness, simple tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God.  A relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken by the inquiring mind and conscience in the French sense which of course has its own rights and its own field of deployment.  I'd like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth.  What do you say to this?  After all, this is not simply what we most need in the world, but really what describes the state of pure process in it.  Keep silent awhile and you feel a comprehension of this act of tenderness - not power or glory: and certainly not Mercy, that vulgarity of the Jewish mind which can only imagine man as crouching under the whip.  No, for the sort of tenderness I mean is utterly merciless!  "A law unto itself" as we say.  Of course, one must always remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance.  Yet I must in this last book insist that there is hope for man, scope for man, within the boundaries of a simple law; and I seem to see mankind as gradually appropriating to itself the necessary information through mere attention, not reason, which may one day enable it to live within the terms of such an idea - the true meaning of "joy unconfined".  How could joy be anything else?  This new creature we artists are hunting for will not "live" so much as, like time itself, simple "elapse".  Damn, it's hard to say these things.  Perhaps the key lies in laughter, in the Humorous God?  It is after all the serious who disturb the peace of the heart with their antics - like Justine.  (Wait.  I must fix myself a ration of gin.)

      'I think it better for us to steer clear of the big oblong words like Beauty and Truth and so on.  Do you mind?  We are all so silly and feeble-witted when it comes to living, but giants when it comes to pronouncing on the universe.  Sufflaminandus erat.  Like you, I have two problems which interconnect: my art and my life.  Now in my life I am somewhat irresolute and shabby, but in my art I am free to be what I must desire to seem - someone who might bring resolution and harmony into the dying lives around me.  In my art, indeed, through my art, I want really to achieve myself by shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin.  Perhaps that's why writers at heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves - do you think?  But then this presupposes a new order of woman too.  Where is she?

      'These, my dear Clea, are some of the perplexities of your omniscient friend, the classical head and romantic heart of Ludwig Pursewarden.

 

      'Ouf!  It is late and the oil in the lamp is low.  I must leave this letter for tonight.  Tomorrow perhaps, if I am in the mood after my shopping, I shall write a little more; if not, not.  Wise one, how much better it would be if we could talk.  I feel I have whole conversations stacked inside me, lying unused!  I think it is perhaps the only real lack of which one is conscious in living alone; the mediating power of a friend's thoughts to place beside one's own, just to see if they match!  The lonely become autocratic, as they must, and their judgements ex cathedra in the very nature of things: and perhaps this is not altogether good for the work.  But here at least we will be well-matched, you on your island - which is only a sort of metaphor like Descartes' oven, isn't it? - and I in my fairy-tale hut among the mountains.

      'Last week a man appeared among the trees, also a painter, and my heart began to beat unwontedly fast.  I felt the sudden predisposition to fall in love - reasoning thus, I suppose: "If one has gone so far from the world and one finds a man in that place, must he not be the one person destined to share one's solitude, brought to this very place by the invisible power of one's selfless longing and destined specially for oneself?"  Dangerous self-delusive tricks the heart plays on itself, always tormented by the desire to be loved!  Balthazar claimed once that he could induce love as a control-experiment by a simple action: namely telling each of two people who had never met that the other was dying to meet them, had never seen anyone so attractive, and so on.  This was, he claimed, infallible as a means of making them fall in love: they always did.  What do you say?

      'At any rate, my own misgivings saved me from the youth who was, I will admit, handsome and indeed quite intelligent, and would have done me good, I think, as a lover - perhaps for a single summer.  But when I say his paintings I felt my soul grow hard and strong and separate again; through them I read his whole personality as one can read a handwriting or a face.  I saw weakness and poverty of heart and a power to do mischief.  So I said goodbye there and then.  The poor youth kept repeating: "Have I done anything to offend you, have I said anything?"  What could I reply - for there was nothing he could do about the offence except live it out, paint it out; but that presupposed becoming conscious of its very existence within himself.

      'I returned to my hut and locked myself in with real relief.  He came at midnight and tried the door.  I shouted "Go away," and he obeyed.  This morning I saw him leaving on the bus, but I did not even wave goodbye.  I found myself whistling happily, nay, almost dancing, as I walked to town across the forest to get my provisions.  It is wonderful whenever one can overcome one's treacherous heart.  Then I went home and was hardly in the door when I picked up a brush and started on the painting which has been holding me up for nearly a month; all the ways were clear, all the relations in play.  The mysterious obstacle had vanished.  Who can say it was not due to our painter friend and the love affair I did not have?  I am still humming a tune as I write these words to you....

      'Later: re-reading your letter, why do you go on so, I wonder, about Pursewarden's death?  It puzzles me, for in a way it is a sort of vulgarity to do so.  I mean that surely it is not within your competence or mine to pass an open judgement on it?  All we can say is that his art overleaps the barrier.  For the rest, it seems to me to be his own private property.  We should not only respect his privacy in such matters but help him to defend it against the unfeeling.  They are his own secrets, after all, for what we actually saw in him was only the human disguise that the artist wore (as in his own character, old Parr, the hopeless sensualist of volume two who turns out in the end to be the one who painted the disputed fresco of the Last Supper - remember?)

      'In much the same sort of way, Pursewarden carried the secret of his everyday life over into the grave with him, leaving us only his books to marvel at and his epitaph to puzzle over: "Here lies an intruder from the East."

      'No.  No.  The death of an artist is quite unassailable.  One can only smile and bow.

      'As for Scobie, you are right in what you say.  I was terribly upset when Balthazar told me that he had fallen down those stairs at the central Quism and killed himself.  Yes, I took his parrot, which by the way was inhabited by the old man's spirit for a long time afterwards.  It reproduced with perfect fidelity the way he got up in the morning singing a snatch of "Taisez-vous, petit babouin" (do you remember) and even managed to imitate the dismal cracking of the old man's bones as he got out of bed.  But then the memory gradually wore out, like an old disc, and he seemed to do it less often and with less sureness of voice.  It was like Scobie himself dying very gradually into silence: this is how I suppose one dies to one's friends and to the world, wearing out like an old dance tune or a memorable conversation with a philosopher under a cherry-tree.  Being refunded into silence.  And finally the bird itself went into a decline and died with its head under its wing.  I was so sorry, yet so glad.

      'For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart - something like that?  I am only trying to express it.  Not to force time, as the weak do, for that spells self-injury and dismay, but to harness its rhythms and put them to our own use.  Pursewarden used to say: "God give us artists resolution and tact"; to which I myself would say a very hearty Amen.

      'But by now you will think that I have simply become an opinionated old shrew.  Perhaps I have.  What does it matter, provided one can get a single idea across to oneself?

      'There is so little time; with the news from Europe becoming worse every day I feel an autumnal quality in the days - as if they were settling towards an unpredictable future.  And side by side with this feeling, I also feel the threads tightening in our sleeves, so to speak, drawing us slowly back towards the centre of the stage once more.  Where could this be but to Alexandria?  But perhaps it will prove to be a new city, different to the one which has for so long imposed itself in our dreams.  I would like to think that, for the old one and all it symbolized is, if not dead, at least meaningless to the person I now feel myself to be.  Perhaps you too have changed by the same token.  Perhaps your book too has changed.  Or perhaps you, more than any of us, need to see the city again, need to see us again.  We, for our part, very much need to see you again and refresh the friendship which we hope exists the other side of the writing - if indeed an author can ever be just a friend to his "characters".  I saw "we", writing in the Imperial Style as if I were a Queen, but you will guess that I mean, simply, both the old Clea and the new - for both have need of you in a future which....'

      There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.